Financial Institutions

The author argues that making markets work requires sound financial regulation, competition policy and policies to facilitate the transfer of technology and to encourage transparency, some fundamental issues neglected by the Washington consensus.

The following two articles, "Market Transparency: Who Wins and Who Loses?" by Robert Bloomfield and Maureen O'Hara and "Quote Disclosure and Price Discovery in Multipele Dealer FInancial Markets" by Mark D. Flood, Ronald Huisman, Kees G. Koedijk, and Ronald J. Mahieu are the first two experimental microstructure articles that the Review of Financial Studies (RFS) has published. We, the editors of the RFS, hope that they are not the last. Therefore I take the unconventional step of introducing the two articles.

In the past two decades there has been an explosion in the use of derivative securities by investors, corporations, mutual funds, and financial institutions. Exchange traded derivatives have experienced unprecedented growth in volume while "exotic" securities (i.e., securities with nonstandard payoff patterns) have become more common in the over-the-counter market. Using the most widely accepted financial models, there are many types of securities which cannot be priced in closed-form. This void has created a great need for efficient numerical procedures for security pricing.

This article suggests that the introduction of bank branching restrictions and federal deposit insurance in the United States likely was motivated by political considerations. Specifically, we argue that these restrictions were instituted for the benefit of the small unit banks that were unable to compete effectively with large, multiunit banks. We analyze this "political hypothesis" in two steps.

In this paper, we critically examine the recommended practice of matching currency footprints. We argue that while matching currency footprints reduces profit variability, this practice can also cause reductions in expected profitability, a point that appears to have been overlooked in current literature. The expected profit effects of matching depend on the trade-off between possible expected cost savings of sourcing abroad verses the loss of what we refer to as "strategic flexibility" in responding to competitors' pricing and quantity decisions.